Symbiont

By 2086, decades of manufacturing shifts, political upheaval, genetic control, and automation have produced a tightly regulated society defined by scarcity, surveillance, and dependence on state infrastructures. As power centralised and labour declined, inequality deepened, giving rise to the Symbiont generation - engineered through synthetic consumption and aesthetic optimisation in pursuit of Ascendura, the state’s ideal of perfection. At the top sit the refined Cladariens; below them, the mechanically augmented Technografts. Resistance groups emerged in response, advocating for organic living. The most radical, the Homo Purus, seek to reclaim an unmodified human identity, using the Echolith as both symbol and tool to restore natural presence in an engineered world.